NetApp Closes Engenio Acquisition

Posted on May 09, 2011 By Stuart J. Johnston

Storage vendor NetApp said Monday that it has completed its purchase of LSI Corp.'s Engenio line of external storage systems products.

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) first announced its acquisition of LSI (NYSE: LSI) the sale two months ago at a cost of a whopping $480 million in cash -- reported to be the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's largest ever purchase.

The deal for Engenio, was scheduled to close within two months, and came in exactly on time.

NetApp's purchase of Engenio gives it an OEM that generated some $705 million in revenue in 2010, and will enable the company to diversify its market reach and enter emerging markets, according to a NetApp statement.

"[Engenio's] portfolio will provide a new platform for us to use for 'big bandwidth' [applications]," Chris Cummings, NetApp vice president of products and solutions marketing, told InternetNews.com.

In fact, NetApp simultaneously unveiled a new addition to its E-Series Platform storage systems, which it has dubbed the E5400.

The E5400 comes as a compact 4U form factor that integrates controllers and drives in order to maximize storage density while reducing operational expenditures, the company said. The unit features a redundant design as well as online administration aimed at providing continuous high-speed data access.

"From managing massive amounts of data generated from big-bandwidth applications to real-time analysis of complex datasets, customers require storage products and solutions that are optimized to help them address these unique applications," NetApp's statement said.

NetApp also debuted an E-Series application to help government agencies store and index full-motion video.

The full-motion video solution is designed for use in surveillance applications including for aerial vehicles such as drones and satellite images.

"The convergence of warfare technology, richer media types, huge datasets, and large-scale data processing is creating new challenges for our customers in terms of how they manage and capture all of this video information," the statement added.

NetApp officials said they are also working on a Hadoop-based data analysis solution that will also run on the E-Series.

"The E-Series Platform enables speed of deployment and simplifies manageability of Hadoop infrastructure, allowing customers to deploy a solution in hours versus weeks and to dynamically expand to petabyte scale," the company said.

That solution is slated for delivery during NetApp's second fiscal quarter next fall.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.

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